


The Sun on the Hill Forgot To Die

by innie



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - All Media Types, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-02-01 04:01:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12696909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/innie/pseuds/innie
Summary: Bill is an artist.  Jim is the art.





	The Sun on the Hill Forgot To Die

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theoldgods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/gifts).



> Title and quotes from [Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "A Musical Instrument,"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43729/a-musical-instrument) which is absolutely magnificent. It probably should be read first if this story is going to make any sense.
> 
> Originally inspired by those two tell-tale photographs of the Inseparables.
> 
> My thanks to Deepdarkwaters for the Britpicking and betaing!

"'Half a beast,' you are," Jim says, pushing Bill's head forward to get at the lean length of his back, and Bill goes, letting Jim's strong fingers swipe away at the mud caked on his skin like a more dramatically textured epidermis. Jim, on his knees next to the bath like a supplicant, speaks like a headmaster. "Rolling around in the mud like a pig in shit, I half expected you to bite that Barker boy."

The bathwater is stingingly hot – Jim talks a good game but indulges him more than all the rest of his lovers put together – and Bill nearly purrs as those fingertips find his flesh. Easing back to give Jim more of his weight, he says without any exaggeration, "I wouldn't put my mouth anywhere near that little scrote." That was a mistake; Jim is running the numbers in his head quite loudly, the list of all the people to whom Bill has applied his mouth. His fingers. His cock.

There is only the sound of water for a long moment, lapping at him like Jim's tongue had before they wended their way down to the rugby pitch. Jim's fingers are pushing through his hair – it must be curling wildly in the humid air – and Bill closes his eyes, trying to think of how they must look. He has long wanted to paint those finely balanced hands with their scraggly nails and livid burn marks, their living whiteness as exquisite as marble against the dead blank of a canvas. He shapes the words with his mouth – _I want to paint your hands_ – and considers the inverse, equally appealing meaning; he could apply paint to Jim's lovely hands and invite him to touch anywhere he desired, turning himself into Jim's canvas. So marked, loops and whorls and strangeness of fingerprints on skin, Bill would be a picture Jim would carry with him for the rest of his life; Jim has that sort of memory, and Bill prides himself on knowing his own best angles and how to use the light.

Jim is the one who breaks the silence, continuing as if there had never been one. Implacable is one word for him. "Like you were making a golem of yourself," he says, peeling away sheets of caked mud from Bill's chest and collarbones and uncovering childishly rosy skin.

"Tell me," Bill invites, though he's heard the story, and languorously closes his eyes; Jim's voice is as miraculous as his hands, and he's of a mind to indulge.

Modest to the point of absurdity, that Jim. He never agrees that the breadth and depth of his knowledge are extraordinary; rather, there's always some mundane reason for his acquisition of esoterica, like having heard the tale once from his grandmother's neighbour, who'd grown up under the old Empire. Bill wonders if it's the hours spent running that allow Jim to retain and organise everything he's ever learnt. Whatever it is, Jim will have to continue to do it alone; he's not going to join those early-morning death marches.

The wet fingertips brushing softly along his brow startle him enough that he bucks, sloshing his bathwater disgracefully. Jim's smile is thoughtful rather than apologetic, but his voice is as gentle as his touch. "The rabbi wrote 'truth' on its forehead and set it to rest by erasing a letter from the clay to turn 'truth' to 'death.'" Bill feels hypnotised, watching Jim's eyes glowing at him out of a mud-streaked face; somehow Jim always manages to spoil him rather than the other way round. "What word would we write on you to set you off on vengeance, my beast?"

"Only half, you said," Bill objects, shaky when he means to be cheeky. Vengeance is not even close to what he wants with Jim. He tips his head back, trying to tempt Jim into the water with him, still hot enough to push little wisps of steam into the air between them. This pose, with his chin up and his eyes glittering below heavy lids, has worked when he is reclining on pillows, and there is no reason to doubt its efficacy though his back is pressed against porcelain rather than down. "And the word should go here, I think," he says, drawing his dripping forefinger along the crest of his cheekbone, just under his eye, where Jim is wont to press his lips, unbearably tender.

"Christ," Jim says, low, rising up on his knees, hand fisting in Bill's hair so that Bill's mouth opens with the thrill of the pain, "it should be 'eyes' erased down to 'yes' with you, the way you look, the way you're looking -"

"It's always 'yes' for you," Bill says, as if it's not 'yes' for others too, because Jim's fidelity despite everything deserves the kindest words he can muster. Hands on Jim's sweaty back – touching, through damp cloth, the muscles he'd admired when Jim hung the canvases for his exhibition, not realising at the time that Jim's exertions put him in the best position to judge the art Bill had laboured faithfully over – he pulls the man who calls him a beast and loves him like a lifeline into the tub with him. Jim brings a fresh infusion of mud into the water, but when Bill lifts his hand to hold Jim's jaw steady for his possessive bites, it looks shiningly clean.

*

"No," Jim says, but he's laughing, the plume of his breath visible in the chilled damp air as he turns to watch Bill's looping progress, "you bloody peacocking lunatic! You're an artist, remember, not the live model; you don't have to make everyone look at you all the time."

Bill wants to dispute that point, but still more he wants to watch Jim, face alight with mirth, drink him in. He ceases to ride circles round Jim, swings his leg over - Jim's eyes darken gratifyingly at that - and stands instead with both feet balanced on a single pedal and rings the bell of his bike just to ensure that the last bystander's head is turned their way.

Autumnal crispness is painting Jim's lean cheeks pink, and Bill, interested in the difference the tide of colour makes on Jim's sallow face, leans in to study him; Jim, rather unexpectedly, does not shy away though they are in public and not in the paradoxically safe openness of a pitch, where Jim is always the cynosure anyway. 

He tracks the falling away of others' gazes by the decreasing degrees of tension in Jim's broad shoulders, and when Jim is very nearly relaxed – not all the way, not when he's aware of Bill's avid gaze on him, brilliant beloved – he drops the bike unceremoniously, letting the bell ring one last gasp, and backs Jim against the nearest brick wall with his hips. Jim's sweater becomes soft folds between his questing fingers, but he doesn't spare its darkness a glance, too intent on the colour of Jim's eyes. A dark green that has always reminded him of pine needles on a forest floor and today puts him in mind – is it the hint of bonfire smoke in the air that does it? – of the Wild Hunt.

He puts his hungry mouth to Jim's wintry throat. There is another colour, of course, that the Wild Hunt insists on: the dark, vital red of welling blood. It is working under Jim's skin even now, and Bill wants to gulp it down so that the shadowed dark green of those eyes grows ever dimmer and Jim will be completely open to him, a cloak inside which Bill can be warm and safe.

Jim pulls away, tips Bill's head back, and dips his own. Jim is tall and splendid, his mouth firm and hot. Bill keeps his eyes open, sees the tender blue of the tiny veins in Jim's dropped lids, more perfect a blue than he has ever seen in a Raphael sky. He burns with a desire for his paints, for Jim's pink mouth to suck him as he paints, for all of these colours to find their way to a canvas that will conjure up Jim at first glance.

Their kisses are endless and wet, the edges of their bodies growing colder as they pass the same hot breath back and forth. When Jim finally pushes him away, dropping his head so the dark fuzz on top tickles Bill's jaw, Bill shies and laughs, feeling _himself_ at long last. It is a surprise to him when he turns his head to keep clear of that soft tuft of hair to see that the front wheel of his bicycle is still pointlessly spinning, though his heart is racing as if he just hopped off it. 

"I only want to look at you," he says into the shadowed hinge of Jim's jaw, answering the earlier charge of vanity. "Everyone else can look at what they want, and be damned to them." Jim's swiftly in-drawn breath is his only reply, and Bill ponders that blue, finding it again on Jim's long throat. He can find a talisman in that colour, surely, something small that no one will be able to link definitively to the one man who has to stay safe no matter what righteous destruction is wrought.

"The damned all want to watch your every move," Jim says softly, as if he's uncertain whether he's teasing. "I always thought you'd want to be immortalised anyway." Bill smiles with good grace though the beast in him wants to bite, to tear through the rest of the world until Jim is all that remains and the question of his own legacy becomes moot. "A statue, maybe, you mounted -"

"'Mounted' meaning you rogering me or me on top of a horse?" he asks, expecting Jim to choke, primly aghast; Jim has not only an athlete's devotion to clean living but the immigrant's patchwork conviction of his chosen home's wondrous propriety. Bill tears away at it – the complex etiquette that has fooled the rest of the globe into idolising this ugly, dreary nation, this empire of sin that counts _his father_ as one of its exemplars – every chance he gets, not without guilt, knowing he has only himself to offer as an alternative.

But Jim only looks at him with shining eyes and frames his face with those scarred, chapped hands that catch sharply on his jaw. "You, magnificent," Jim says and kisses his brow like a heathen might the feet of his idol.

Bill shakes that night when he remembers the moment, two whisky tumblers falling from his hands and shattering before he boils the kettle instead. The blue of the teacup is not right to match Jim's winding veins - too pale and matte - but the object itself is innocuous enough that he can keep it close, put his lips to it, whenever his devotee is out of his reach.

*

He has made his mark, after all, on canvas after canvas. All he has ever painted, he sees now, is Jim.

He has called them _awful daubs_ to keep anyone else from seeing that tell-tale dark green, the rivers of scarlet, the venous blue too smoky for water. Even the blacks, tinged with faint undercurrents of light, are Jim – the colour all he could see when Jim's lips touched his eyelids. And the angles at which the colours collide are lifted from life, specific: the proud jut of Jim's thick cock, the mouth-watering slope of his broad hands into slim wrists, the corded curves of his thighs, the lengths of his toes curling to rounds as he came.

Jim called him only half a beast when Bill is wholly one, as an artist must be. "'The only way, since gods began / To make sweet music, they could succeed,'" he mutters from behind the bars, because he has long since looked up the source of Jim's metred epithet for him. He has scavenged his beloved – the only lover so preyed upon – and produced art for the unthinking along with the bones of a better world, a braver era; Jim will never choose to be its king, but cannot escape being its patron saint. 

He wants to see Jim again, see him without being seen if he must, to let his eyes linger on the lovely shape of him and take it with him to the East. He cannot – it is one of Smiley's unnumbered cruelties that the Inseparables should be absolutely sundered, a very effective one. Not all are so; Bill has found solace in the least of them, the replacement of his crisp three-piece suits with shapeless garments befitting a prisoner, as the navy-blue sweater providing protection from the raw cold of the air might have been Jim's for size, softness, and warmth.

He lifts the cuffs to his nose, searching for a trace of the man who never owned this sweater, then scents the air, suddenly sure: Jim is here, nearby, drinking in the sight of him. Bill takes a few steps to rid himself of nervous energy and stops, tilting his head just right – he knows his own best angles still and how to make the light his ally. His eyes are saying yes when Jim turns truth to death, his implacable bullet striking just at the crest of his cheekbone, remembering the gesture from years ago when Bill felt no less but Jim believed it more.


End file.
